Oh, Nothing and Everything

My mind has been a wash in words. To many letters and syllables floating endlessly around my silly brain. All full of meaning, all full of nothing. Silver ribbon-like sentences wrap around my ears and thread through my nose to exit again from my flapping mouth. Nonsense. Warped and fading like an old newspaper or curling indecipherable like negatives left in the sun, my words are singed and dying on paper and plastic. Or maybe they are swirling down the drain, the little black letters spinning in circles as they spiral their way down, down, down, to be lost in the pipes below my house. To the septic tank they go. Good riddance.

Emptiness spawns discontent, discontent breeds annoyance, and annoyance blooms to hate the status-quo. Something is just not right. Too many things to do every day. Some days the speed with which time eats my day is exponential. While the sun shines my days resemble a giant catapult where I sail over the top of the land seeing everything, but touching nothing. My life will not be a museum. I can not just be a passenger going though the motions.

I was taking a breather, sitting in the shade outside, reclined in the rocking chair with my dry summer feet propped on the wobbly wooden pick-nick bench. Looking out across the special golden light that falls just before the sun sets, I watched the kids riding their bikes in the dirt field. Boys on bikes.

They circled round and round, rode over bumps and breezed through the low flying swarms of gnats. Their halo of innocence shone brightly from their youthful bodies, their internal time machines set for endless days. Time moves slowly for them. Every day is like an eternity in their mind. Nothing ever happens fast enough.

The swarms of bugs flying in that perfect lighting sparkled and shimmered in the long fading rays. Cottonwood trees, yellowing with the season, cast their aura of mellow change. Slow time down, I say.

Stretched to thinly, my gossamer strings are breaking. One by one the taught threads begin to unravel and shred. They are snapping. Something has to give. What falls from the web won't be the heaviest burden. Often the anchors mean the most. Rather the lighter things fall first. As they drift through space, floating away effortlessly, there is a lightness on the web which is not commiserate with the size of the object that has been set free. Those things are easy to do without, they were not important to begin with. It is just deciding where to trim with surgical precision that makes Mrs. Spider realize what is most important and what keeps the web whole.

Mrs. Spider crawls back to the center of her web. She sits and thinks as darkness fully engulfs her world and she notices a half moon glowingly slowly yellow just over the horizon. It is harmoniously half dark and half light; however, for her the balance is still not exactly right. But her decisions have corrected some of the schism. Yin and Yang, black with white, hot to cold. There must be a happy gray in between the lines somewhere.

Coolness descends from a clear star-filled sky in disjointed sheets and tempers the malcontent. The malaise eases and a kind of momentary calm settles over the web. That is only until the golden orb we call the sun rises again and the frenzy begins anew. But maybe tomorrow just a little less feverishly...